I'm not sure that I ever fully appreciated, prior to now, just how much of an odd duck
MC6 Monstrous Compendium Kara-Tur Appendix really is.
For instance, it wasn't until I went back over this MC that I realized how unusual its designation is. The standard convention is that an MC appendix will share the name of the campaign setting that it's for, such as how MC3 was the Forgotten Realms appendix, or later on we'll come to the Mystara appendix, etc. But by that token, this should be called the
Oriental Adventures appendix, since that's the name of the campaign setting book for this MC.
Now, my guess is that it's instead calling itself "Kara-Tur" because (in a manner similar to how Al-Qadim split its basic information between the
Arabian Adventures and
Land of Fate), the actual setting information was (mostly) confined to
Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms...but even if it has the name of the continent in its title, it was still published under the Forgotten Realms logo.
As it turns out, this is actually a bit of confusion that's really part of the 1E/2E OA line as a whole. Most of the AD&D 1E adventures, such as
O1 Swords of the Daimyo, were all published under the Oriental Adventures banner. But
OA5 Mad Monkey vs the Dragon Claw started using the Forgotten Realms logo, with "Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms" as a sort of sub-logo. Then
OA6 Ronin Challenge switched out the sub-logo (but kept the FR brand listing) to "Oriental Adventures." Then
OA7 Test of the Samurai switched it back. And finally,
FROA1 Ninja Wars dropped the sub-logo altogether, being just an FR product. So perhaps it's no surprise that the OA MC wasn't actually tagged as being OA (or Forgotten Realms, for that matter).
Whew! All of that and we're not even past the cover yet!
Another thing that's odd about this book is how it openly references the original
Oriental Adventures, despite this being an AD&D 2E product and that being an AD&D 1E sourcebook. I know that's only "odd" given how we nowadays expect that edition changes to be a big deal, but it's remarkably indicative of how they weren't seen as that big of a deal then. And I'm not just talking about this MC's mentioning that book in its introduction. Quite a few monsters in here, for instance, have magical abilities that blithely reference spells from OA which (I'm pretty sure) hadn't been reprinted for AD&D 2E when this book came out.
Reading those now honestly makes me feel like John Cusack when he hooked back up with his old girlfriend (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in
High Fidelity. Did I just overlook all of these? Did I somehow edit them out? Nowadays something like this wouldn't bother me too much, but back then – and I'm fairly certain I picked this book up well within the first five or so years of my gaming career – I was turning my nose up at 1E all over the place, convinced that it was obsolete in the face of 2E's release. And yet I have no memory of acknowledging this blatant cross-edition referencing.
As for the monsters themselves, leaving aside the obligatory note that most of them are updated from 1E (though not all of them are; here is where we
finally started getting new monsters), I feel like there's an underlying issue with using these in most campaigns. It's not so much an issue of baggage in terms of how much of the underlying culture these monsters' presence connotes (though I won't say that's not a thing, as I had much the same objections to using the pantheons in
Legends & Lore, though gods have a much larger in-game footprint than monsters do), since D&D is by its nature a game that trades in pastiches; no one, I suspect, would blink an eye at having a leprechaun plotting against a local medusa, despite the disparate real-world cultures that spawned those particular monsters.
No, the issue here is that a lot of these monsters have their baggage present
within the context of the campaign, and that comes in the form of two words: the Celestial Bureaucracy...which, I'm like 99% sure, is the Chinese pantheon from the aforementioned L&L sourcebook.
Leaving aside the deft nature of the fact that "the Celestial Bureaucracy" nicely avoids having to call the pantheon by an Earth-specific place name, the fact that quite a few of this MC's monsters talk about their position within/connection to the Celestial Bureaucracy isn't really an issue; after all, that's a part of the specific campaign setting that these monsters are a part of. But D&D monsters have always been presented as being good for generic use in most homebrew campaigns as well, and while there are plenty of other monster books that have in-world specificity to their creatures (Ravenloft being a big "offender," here), the fact that this references an entire
pantheon of gods feels like it creates an outsized effect...if you use, for example, a spirit centipede as-is, and your PCs research it to learn that it acts as the Celestial Bureaucracy dictates, then it's just opened up a vast new area in your campaign world's cosmology.
I know I'm overthinking this – and it's not like
all of the monsters here are affiliated with the CB – but this just doesn't strike me as something that can be easily erased for the monsters that are. I suppose if you wanted to erase the Celestial Bureaucracy but keep the monsters' motivations, you could just say that they're like fey, in that they have bizarre habits that mortals can't understand, and have that be that.
Beyond that, there are a few other points that need to be mentioned, ranging from the gargantua monsters being clear analogues to
kaiju such as Godzilla and Mothra, to the shirokinukatsukami being the monster with longest name in all of D&D (take that, ixitxachitl!), to the sheer weirdness of the krakentua, which are hundred-foot tall humanoids with squid-heads and (in the females of the species) psychic powers. Did someone decide that we needed an entire
race of Cthulhus?
While I won't go so far as to say that this is the last book that puts a premium on mythology to generate new monsters (there are plenty of demons, devils, angels, etc. to come), it does strike me as notable that after this we're going to get more into campaign worlds that draw less from real-world inspirations for their monsters. Exceptions will abound, of course (once again, I point to Al-Qadim), but from here on out, things will start to get much more bizarre, starting with the depths of wildspace...
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